| In 1550 Robert Crowley printed the first edition of Piers Plowman (STC 19906). Later in the same year the poem was reprinted by Crowley. This second edition is found, however, in two separate states which contain, as Bishop Percy first pointed out (Reliques, II, 262) "evident variations in every page." The title-page of one of these states (STC 19907a) reads "nowe the seconde time imprinted" while on the title-page of the other (STC 19907) the word time is spelled tyme. One of the purposes of this dissertation was to determine which is the earlier of these two states. In his edition of the poem W. W. Skeat (EETS OS 38) maintained that that state with the title-page which reads "seconde time" is the true "second impression" and is consequently prior to the impression with "seconde tyme" on the title-page. The editors of the STC, on the other hand, regarded Skeat's "second impression" as a "mere variant" of the state which reads "seconde tyme". The conclusions reached in this thesis are in agreement with Skeat's attribution of priority.;The lost MS from which Crowley printed his first edition was a B-text MS closely related to MS. W but differing from W in important respects. In addition to his base-MS Crowley also had access to three other MSS. One was a C-text MS, two lines of which are quoted in "The Printer to the Reader". This MS supplied Crowley with a few scattered readings in the first part of the poem. The earliest impression of the second edition was set-up from a copy of the first edition which had been "corrected" by Crowley with reference to two other MSS. One of these was an A-text MS from which a six line passage was extracted and inserted in the Prologue (following line 215) of both impressions of the second edition. The second was a B-text MS which resembles MSS Y, O, C(,2), C, B, Bm, Cot. This MS was the source of a number of new readings in the second edition, as well as of at least three complete lines which are lacking in MS. W and in Crowley's first edition.;In the course of collating Crowley's editions I discovered that one copy in the Yale Library is made-up of both first and second edition quires, and one anomalous quire ("I") which resembles the corresponding quire in the first edition but which differs from it in hundreds of readings. This quire was found to be a later impression of the first edition and an intermediate state between Crowley's earliest printing and the first impression of the second edition. This suggests that there was a fourth printing of Piers Plowman, of which only this anomalous "I" quire is preserved in Yale's five copies. |
